Introduction
Poker had seen an explosion of growth in the 21st century. Poker had seen booms in popularity previously, especially when Hold’em poker had been legalized in California in 1988. However, nothing in poker’s history could have compared with what had been happening now.
What’s Behind the Growth?
Two features had propelled poker to its current heights, and there hadn’t appeared to be any limit to the growth. Firstly, in the present day, you could watch poker on television almost every day of the year. The major success had been the unparalleled World Poker Tournament, having made superstars of tournament players.
Network research had shown that poker had great ‘sticking power’ among channel surfers: those who had happened upon poker had tended to continue to watch. Viewers had seen apparently ordinary people winning millions in tournaments and they had become fascinated by this ultimate and yet most accessible to reality shows. This exposure had aided the creation of an unprecedented interest in the game.
Secondly, although in the past people may have been willing to play poker, apart from weekly home games, most had not had the opportunity. This was surely no longer the case, however. Once restricted in the United States to a few Western states, public cardrooms – some land-based, some on cruising or permanently docked riverboats, some full-blown casinos on Indian reservations – offering virtually nonstop poker games have spread to many states.
Those states that not had official cardrooms had offered regular ‘charity nights’ that had included games for poker players. Twenty years ago poker had been available in the United States and United Kingdom, and that was all. Now, the casinos of several European countries, as well as Canada, Australia, and countries in Central and South America too, offer poker.
And, even if a live poker game weren’t available in your area, the introduction of Internet poker had would allow you to play from the comfort of your own home. In fact, Internet poker is largely contributing to poker’s recent exponential growth.
Not All Forms of Poker Have Benefited Equally
Although it had been true that more people than ever had been playing poker today, not all of the many forms of the game had benefited equally from its popularity explosion. In fact, one could debate that poker’s growth had truly been specific to only one form of the game – Texas Hold’em*. Everyone appeared to want to play hold’em poker nowadays, whether it’s the no-limit version that was seen on television and played mainly in tournaments, or the limit version that had constituted most of the games in public cardrooms and on the Internet. Even numerous ‘Saturday night’ types of poker players, who for years had enjoyed their creative kitchen-table forms of poker, were currently switching to hold’em.
The Golden Age of Hold’em
This had really been the Golden Age of Hold’em poker. If there were one form of poker to learn or to specialize in, it would be hold’em. Not only would you find more games to choose from, but also the players in these had tended to be less knowledgeable and experienced than those in other forms of poker, like seven-card stud. Simply put, hold’em games would have been easier to beat than other games just because that’s what everyone had been playing.
In poker, your results over time would be based on the quality of your play relative to your opposition. This would explain why a poker player might be able to win at the games at a particular limit, but not at a higher limit – the quality of opposition would tend to increase, as you would progress in limits (although this would not always be true). With the huge entry of new hold’em poker players, you would be playing against a large number of green, less skilled players. Thus, hold’em games would often be very lucrative.
Being capable of making money at hold’em poker would assume, of course, that you would play better than your opponents. Regrettably, this wouldn’t happen overnight, and while it would certainly be possible to walk into a cardroom, sit right down, and win on your very first session, it just would not be very likely. The large amount of short-term luck in poker would make it possible for anyone to be a winner on any particular day, but if were planning on playing more than once it would not be a bad idea to know what you would be doing.
The Paradox of Hold’em
One of the fascinating features about hold’em would be its nature. The game would be both incredibly simple and incredibly complex. If you were to watch any World Poker Tournament (WPT) broadcast, you would hear hold’em described as a game that ‘would take a minute to learn and a life-time to master.’
That would certainly be true, and a major part of the attraction of the game would be that you could sit down and learn how to play almost instantaneously. In this sense, hold’em poker could be approached like other games found in the casino, where you could comprehend the basic mechanics of the game well enough to play it, and the luck element would present you with some chance of emerging a winner.
However, after playing a bit, you would become aware that hold’em poker has many levels, each more complicated than the previous one. The deeper you would develop your comprehension of the game, the better your results would be. The best thing for you would be this: most poker players would never work to improve on their games.
What they would know about the game would be strictly what they would draw from their personal experience at the table, much of which they wouldn’t correctly interpret. In fact, they would often misread their experience in counterproductive ways. So there would be great opportunity -Poker Fundamentals- for those who would wish to invest a bit of time and effort in improving their poker game.
Tools for today’s Hold’em Players
Modern hold’em poker players will have several tools to assist in reducing the learning time. There will be videos, computer software, seminars, Internet chat forums, personal poker trainers for hire, and, of course, books. Presently, a large number of books on limit hold’em will be available, with several others being written. However, very little will exist for the brand new player, whose only exposure to hold’em may be what he would have seen on television and perhaps a few hands played at a casino or in a home game.
Why You Need this Book
This book will provide someone who has been playing a little or hasn’t played no limit hold’em poker with a sound basic strategy that will add to both his enjoyment of the game and his bottom line. You would have to walk before you could run, and this book will teach those first steps.
How to Use this Book
If you will absorb and put into practice the information in this book, you should become a winning low-limit hold’em poker player. This will put you ahead of the ninety percent or so of public cardroom poker players who will lose money at the game. Once you were to acquire a framework for beating the game, you could then take your game to the next level.
The book has been designed for simplicity. Fifty-two tips have been presented, each of which has provided a valuable kernel of information. The poker tips have been presented chronologically as you progress through a hand of hold’em. Obviously, everything to know about hold’em poker couldn’t be reduced to just fifty-two items. However, these fifty-two tips on poker have dealt with some of the most important and most frequently encountered decisions you would have had to make.
Hold’em poker could have been very complicated and quite uncomplicated. This book has kept this game as simple as possible for you. Specifically, they have done this by presenting a strategy that would help you steer clear of several of the common pitfalls in hold’em poker, pitfalls that could swiftly eat away at your stack of chips. Staying out of potentially dangerous situations has been very important to a player new to the game of poker, as many of them would have required a feel for the game that only experience could have produced.
While this book has been aimed at the newer poker player, the concepts have been relevant to all levels of hold’em. Thus they think that most poker players would have found some benefits to their game by reading this book. Even if the tips presented in the book haven’t been new to you, you would have found it beneficial to have treated them as a refresher course, since a true mastery of poker would have involved not only learning concepts, but having remembered and put them into practice.
Tip Order
The fifty-two poker tips presented in this book have appeared in approximately chronological order. That is, after the first three tips, they start with play prior to the flop, then on the flop, and so on.
Our Partners
Three Universal Hold’em Concepts
Tip: 1-3
Playing Before the Flop
Tip: 4-16
Playing on the Flop
Tip: 17-27
Playing on the Turn
Tip: 28-37
Playing on the River
Tip: 38-45
More Hold’em Concepts You Should Know
Tip: 46-52
